I am an oats fan..... I'll tell you why. I ride a black horse. Now give the girl sweet feed, and put her under saddle on a hot day, and she' laying down on me. Anyway a woman from a million dollar QH farm, that has been in the biz for 30 years and hasn't done badly told me, if you look back and read alot you will see that the old time horse breeders used oats! Another friend that is a equine nutritionist told me, that if you do your homework you will see that some horses are allergic to corn, (which is in sweet feed). SO we use a ration balancer.. called Grow N Win by Buckeye. The million dollar horse farm swears by it.
But let me give you an example of the economics of feed. We purchased a mare (six years old), from a well known mini farm. She was being fed 13 ounces of Sweet Feed (you'd know the checker board name if I mentioned it) twice a day. She's a large mare. I switched her to our Grow N Win (two parts oats and one part Grow N WIn), and fed her 12 ounces per feeding. She put on 14 pounds in about ten days. I had to cut her back and cut her back and cut her back. She is now maintaining weight, even though she's in training to drive, and only getting SEVEN (7) ounces twice a day. So we use almost half the amount of feed that she was getting.
Now Grow N Win costs $22.00s for a 50 lb bag.. So everyone is screaming... TOO EXPENSIVE. But they have a coupon on sample bags for $5.00s off. So we're down to $17.00s a bag, plus we get two bags of Oats... ($8.00s). So for $38.00s we have 150 lbs of feed! and that's without the coupon! Now figure, if we fed Sweet Feed, we'd be buying 300 lbs to feed the same horse, or spending $48.00s. So you see how cheap the good expensive feed really is? Does this make sense? I'm thinking about $8 bucks a bag for sweet feed. So do I win the money aspect???
So we go on, to how the feed determines the shape of the horse.
Well, look at my avatar and let me tell you, she's a Grow N Win poster child... I get good results out of Grow N WIn and Buckeye products. Progressive feeds were engineered by the same man, so they are awesome too, but very far for me to travel. But the key I think is.. that you need a ration balancer.... not a bunch of molasses, (which is a by product that my husband wouldn't even let the children have).
That's my take on the question....
God Bless,
Lynn W